The Wikisource Community User Group focus is to support the Wikisource community in international communication tasks, outreach to external groups, coordination of software tools development, and facilitate fundraising according to its member needs.

Proposed activities

Outreach - attracting more active community members and raising awareness of Wikisource, collaborating with GLAM Wiki groups and their activities as much as possible

Community support - supporting volunteer editors in order to contribute more effectively

Communication - facilitate discussions and flow of information between Wikisource communities and the Wikimedia movement

Software development - supporting the development of MediaWiki features to accommodate the specific needs of the Wikisource community

Fundraising - raise funds both from the Wikimedia movement and from external and partner organizations to conduct its activities.

History of the WCUG

The need for a Wikisource supporting organization became clear after the Wikimania 2012 meeting when Aubrey and other involved wikimedians drafted a roadmap for Wikisource, and then the question about who would implement that roadmap arose. A dedicated group of volunteers coordinated at international level can accomplish a lot, and even if they don't have the knowledge or the resources to do it by themselves, they can find ways to get things done.

The "Elaborate Wikisource strategic vision" project led by Aubrey and Micru, with assistance of Tpt, continued that community building task and it proposed to create the WCUG as a long term strategy to coordinate efforts internationally, set priorities and manage funds whenever needed.

Members have been conducting Wikisource activities independently, among them we can point out to:

Elaborate Wikisource vision, internal effort to enhance cross-language and cross-community coordination, pave the way for future developments, and establish contacts with external organizations.

GLAM wiki boot camp: tutorial in editing Wikisource, which was entirely new to all but three people, generated a large amount of interest and led to the partial transcription of The Yellow Wall Paper.

Becoming a member

Currently there are no restrictions for becoming a WCUG member, anyone that participates frequently in any local Wikisource and wants to contribute to make Wikisource a more internationally coordinated community is welcome to join the mailing list and sign up below.

Once a year the group will be promoted to the most active members of all local Wikisource communities and the accomplishments of the WCUG members will be summarized.

Governance

In this initial phase, anyone can become a promoter and/or take the lead as "community liason" for their local wikisource, communicating their local Wikisource news to the international Wikisource mailing list, and importing the international news into their local community. All initiatives will be at individual level, or consensuated in the mailing list whenever needed.

As the group grows, the transition towards a thematic organization will be considered. In a possible scenario, we can set 100 members as a threshold: at this point some members will be elected as a board for a 2 years period, to either continue coordinating activities as user group or to start the transition towards incorporation.

Transforming words into action

In order to transforming the wishes and ideas of the WCUG members (and the Wikisource users in general) into action, the group counts on several tools:

User involvement to accomplish tasks by themselves or to find consensus in their local community about topics brought up in the international mailing list. For important issues members will be contacted individually by the promoters.

Coding grants (Google summer of code, Outreach Program for Women), for those projects that need development time that cannot be provided by volunteers alone.

Wikimedia grants for those projects that need monetary support

Calls for Action, when all the above fails or the task is too big to be handled by the WCUG members alone, the group will issue a Call for Action to the Wikimedia movement organizations.

Communication

For communication, we'd like to use the already existing wikisource-l (https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikisource-l). As the Wikisource UG would support all Wikisource projects, we think that the list would have a major impact than a dedicated, brand-new mailing list, and the scope of the list and the group perfectly match.

Updates

2013

Invitation to the User Group: On 25 July 2013, this invitation was sent to the most active members of the Wikisource communities in order to raise awareness about the existence of the effort to create an international group that would help to "get things done" and foster participation in the Wikisource mailing list. This message was sent as a one-off and users who received it will not get more personal messages unless they register in the mailing list.

Wikisource community survey: in order to get to know what the community considers prioritary for Wikisource and its user group, everybody is invited to take this survey. The idea of the survey started on the Wikisource mailing list on Sept 19 (see initial message by Aubrey) and after a lengthy discussion and it being translated into 11 languages by volunteers, it went public on Oct 14 2013 for 2 weeks (see message). For the results see: Wikisource survey report

Wikisource 10th anniversary proofreading contest, run by volunteers in it-ws, ca-ws and en-ws, from 24th Nov 2013. More information in this blog post.